I don't remember the last time I listened to the radio or watched tv, or listened to online music, or watched tv online. I may buy one newspaper per month. Napster and Rhapsody might have been bad but they were just failed businesses, which is unlike the demise of more established media.

Gobobo:Napster and Rhapsody might have been bad but they were just failed businesses, which is unlike the demise of more established media.

Napster isn't a bad service. It's $5 per month for unlimited, on-demand streaming plus 5 mp3 downloads of your choice per month. In other words, it's spending $5 per month on iTunes and getting unlimited on-demand streaming for free. Or having a paid spotify account, but getting 5 song downloads for free.

iTunes won the market due to bundling with the iPod. When I first signed up for Napster/Virgin (2005-6?), it was basically Spotify. You had unlimited streaming to your comp and could load those songs to a compatible portable. Alternatively, you could buy individual songs. The problem is that the iPod dominated portable music player sales and Apple used lock-in to ensure that iTunes succeeded. All legal download services until a few years ago had DRM, and iPods didn't work with the DRM everyone but the iTunes store could use. So Napster customers were relegated to people (like me) who just wanted to stream to their computer, or who bought one of a handful of portables that weren't the iPod.

I use Rhapsody - got tired of downloading music illegally and get halfway through the song before it shat the bed with distortion or quality drop. With 4G phones, you can stream Rhapsody and it works great - days of having two devices (MP3 and phone) will not be missed.